The Eight Mountains Read online

  “No, no. It’s just that soon we’ll find snow.”

  I had already noticed it in the shadow of the rocks: old snow that had been rained on and would soon turn into slush. But further up, when I lifted my head, I saw that it stained the scree and filled broad expanses of the gorges of Grenon. On the whole of the north side it was still winter. The snow followed the shape of the mountain like a film negative, with the black of the rocks warming in the sun and the white of the snow surviving in the areas of shadow: I was thinking about this when we reached the lake. Just as it had that first time, the lake revealed itself suddenly.

  “Do you remember this place?” asked Bruno.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s not like in the summer, eh?”

  “No.”

  Our lake in April was still covered by a layer of ice, by an opaque white veined with thin blue cracks, like those that form in porcelain. There was no regular geometrical aspect to this craquelure, or any comprehensible lines of fracture. Here and there slabs of ice had been raised by the force of the water, and along the banks in sunlight you could see the first darker tones, the beginning of summer.

  And yet casting our eyes around the basin it seemed as if we were seeing two seasons at once. On this side was the scree, the bursts of juniper and rhododendron, on the other the woods and the snow. Over there the wake of an avalanche came down along the Grenon and ended up in the lake. Bruno headed straight for it: leaving the shore, we began to climb up the snow slope, a frozen crust that almost always held firm beneath our feet, but that sometimes suddenly gave way. When it did so we would sink thigh-deep in snow. Every false step cost us a laborious extraction, and it was only after half an hour of such halting progress that Bruno allowed us to rest: he found a stone wall that emerged from the snow, climbed on top of it, and cleaned off his boots by knocking them together. I sat down without caring about my sodden feet. I had an overwhelming desire to get back in front of the stove, to eat, and to sleep.

  “Here we are,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “What do you mean where? At your place.”

  It was only then that I looked around. Although the snow altered the shape of everything, I could see that where we were standing the slope formed a kind of wooded terrace. A wall of flat, high, and unusually white rock came down onto this plateau, facing the lake. From the snow emerged the remains of three drystone walls, one of which I was sitting on, built from the same white rock. Two short walls and a longer one in front, four meters by seven, just as the land registry map had specified: the fourth wall, which supported the other three, was the rock face itself that had provided the material for their construction. Of the collapsed roof there was no trace. But inside the ruin, in the middle of the snow, a small Swiss pine had begun to grow, having found its way amongst the rubble, and reached up to the height of the walls. So there it was, my inheritance: a rock face, snow, a pile of shaped stones, a pine tree.

  “When we first chanced across this place it was September,” Bruno said. “Your father said immediately: this is the one. We had seen so many, since I had been going with him on these searches for quite a while, but this one he liked at first sight.”

  “Was it last year?”

  “No, no. It was nearly three years ago. Then I had to find the owners and persuade them to sell. Nobody ever sells anything up here. It’s OK to keep a ruin for your entire lifetime, but not to sell it to someone who might actually do something with it.”

  “And what did he want to do with it?”

  “Build a house.”

  “A house?”

  “Sure.”

  “My father always hated houses.”

  “Well, it seems like he changed his mind.”

  Meanwhile it had started to rain: I felt a drop on the back of my hand and saw that it was halfway between rain and snow. Even the sky seemed undecided between winter and spring. The sky hid the mountains and divested things of their mass, but even on such a morning as this I could sense the beauty of this place. A somber, bitter beauty, communicating awesome power rather than tranquillity, as well as a degree of anguish. The beauty of the reverse side.

  “Does it have a name, this place?” I asked.

  “Yes, I think so. According to my mother it was once called barma drola. She’s never wrong about such things; she remembers all the names.”

  “So the barma is that rock over there?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the drola?”

  “That means strange.”

  “Strange because it’s so white?”

  “I think yes.”

  “The strange rock,” I said, to hear what it sounded like.

  I stayed sitting there for a while, to look around me and to reflect on the meaning of this inheritance. My father, the same person who had fled from houses all his life, had cultivated a desire to build one up here. He hadn’t been able to do so. But imagining his own death, he had thought of leaving the place to me. Who knows what he wanted from me.

  Bruno said: “I’m available for the summer.”

  “Available for what?”

  “To work, no?”

  And since I did not seem to understand, he explained: “Your father designed the house, the way he wanted it. And he made me promise that I would build it. He was sitting right where you’re sitting now when he asked me.”

  The revelations kept on coming. The map of the routes, the red and the green that accompanied the black—and I thought that there were many other things that Bruno had yet to tell me. As for the house, if my father had arranged everything in this way I saw no reason not to observe his wishes. Except for one, that is.

  “But I don’t have any money,” I said. My inheritance had already been used up settling my disastrous finances. There was a little left, but hardly enough to build a house with, and I didn’t feel like using it for this. I had a long list of deferred wishes to fulfill.

  Bruno nodded. He had expected this objection. He said: “All that we need to do is buy the materials. And even on them I think it’s possible to save quite a bit.”

  “Fine, but who is going to pay you for doing the work?”

  “Don’t worry about me. This isn’t the kind of job you expect to get paid for.”

  He did not explain to me what he meant, and just as I was about to ask him he added: “It would be useful to have someone to lend a hand. With a laborer I’d be able to finish it in three or four months. What do you say, are you up for it?”

  Down in the plains I would have laughed at the suggestion. I would have answered that I didn’t know how to do anything, and that I would have been of no help whatsoever. But I was sitting on a wall in the middle of the snow, facing a frozen lake at an altitude of two thousand meters. I had begun to feel a sense of inevitability: for reasons unknown to me my father had wanted to bring me here, to this clearing pummeled by landslides, beneath that strange rock, to work together with this man on these ruins. OK, dad, I said to myself, set me another riddle; let’s see what you’ve prepared for me. Let’s see what else there is to learn.

  “Three or four months?” I asked.

  “Oh sure.”

  “When do you want to start then?”

  “As soon as the snow melts,” Bruno replied. Then he jumped down from the wall and began to explain to me how he thought it should be done.

  SIX

  THE SNOW DISAPPEARED quickly that year. I returned to Grana at the beginning of June, at the height of the thawing season, with the water swelling the river and coursing down from everywhere in the valley, forming short-lived waterfalls and streams which I had never seen before. It seemed as if you could feel it beneath your feet, that snowmelt from the mountains, and even a thousand meters lower down it rendered the earth as soft as moss. As for the rain that fell daily, we decided to ignore it: one Monday morning at dawn we took from Bruno’s house a spade, a pickaxe, a large hatchet, a chainsaw, and half a tank of petrol, and with all this ge
ar on our backs we climbed up to my property—to Barma, as we had begun to call it. Although he was carrying the heavier load, I was the one who had to stop every quarter of an hour to get my breath back. I would put down the rucksack and sit on the ground—all the errors that my father had once taught me to avoid—and we would stay there in silence, avoiding each other’s gaze while my heart slowed down.

  Up above, the snow had given way to mud and dead grass, allowing me to better assess the state that the ruins were in. The walls seemed solid enough up to about a meter of their height, thanks to cornerstones that even the two of us together could not have shifted; but for a meter above that the long wall was leaning outwards, pushed by the beams of the roof before it collapsed; and the short walls were completely unstable, with the last course of stones hanging on precariously at the height of a man. Bruno said that we would have to demolish them almost down to the base. It would be useless to try to straighten skewed walls: much better to simply throw them down and start from scratch.

  But first we had to prepare the building site. It was ten in the morning when we entered the ruin and began to free it of all the collapsed rubble inside.

  This was mostly made up of shingles that had once been the tiles of the roof, but also of the old flooring that divided the ground floor from the first, and in the midst of all this sodden wood there were beams of six or seven meters in length still jammed into the walls or stuck in the ground. Some had withstood exposure, and Bruno checked to see if they could be reused. We labored a good deal extracting the sound ones and dragging them outside, rolling them beyond the walls on two inclined planks, while the spoiled ones were split and stored away as firewood.

  Because of his truncated fingers, Bruno had learned how to use a chainsaw left-handed. He held the wood down with his foot and worked with the tip of the blade, cutting very close to his boot sole and raising a cloud of sawdust behind him. The pleasant smell of burnt wood perfumed the air. Then the piece he was cutting off would fall, and I would collect it for stacking.

  I soon got tired. I was still less used to working with my arms than with my legs. At midday we came out of the ruins covered in dust and sawdust. There were four fine larch trunks beneath the big rock wall, cut down a year ago and left there to season: when the time came they would become the beams of the new roof, but for now I used one to sit on.

  “I’m worn out already,” I said. “And we haven’t even started yet.”

  “We’ve started all right,” Bruno said.

  “We’ll need a week just to clear up. And to demolish the walls, and to clear the ground around here.”

  “We might do. Who knows?”

  In the meantime we had made a fireplace with stones and lit a small fire with the woodchips for kindling. As hot and sweaty as I was, it was still pleasurable to dry myself in front of a fire. I rummaged in my pockets, found the tobacco, and rolled a cigarette. I offered the packet to him, and he said: “I don’t know how. If you do it for me I’ll try one.”

  When I lit it he tried hard not to cough. I could see that he wasn’t a smoker.

  “Have you been a smoker for long?” he asked.

  “I started one summer when I was here. So how old must I have been, sixteen or seventeen.”

  “Really? I never saw you smoke.”

  “Because I smoked in secret. I would go into the woods so as not to be seen. Or up onto the roof of the house.”

  “And who were you hiding from? From your mother?”

  “I don’t know. I would just hide, that’s all.”

  Bruno sharpened the ends of two small sticks with his penknife. He took some sausage from his rucksack, cut it into pieces, and put them to grill. He also had bread, a black loaf from which he cut two large chunks and gave one to me.

  He said: “Look, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. If you try to think too far ahead with this kind of work it’ll drive you nuts.”

  “So what should I think about?”

  “About today. Look what a beautiful day it is.”

  I looked around. You needed a degree of optimism to describe it in such terms. It was one of those days in late spring when the wind is always gusting in the mountains. Banks of clouds came and went, blocking the sun, and the air was still cold, as if an obstinate winter was refusing to make its departure. Down below, the lake looked like black silk rippled by the wind. But actually no, it was the other way round: the wind was like an icy hand smoothing out the movements on its surface. I felt like stretching my own out towards the fire, to steal from it a little of its heat.

  In the afternoon we continued to extract the rubble until we reached the floor of the ruin: planking which clearly showed the nature of the building. On one side, against the long wall, we found the feeding troughs, while a small gutter in the dead center of the room served as a drain for the manure. The floor was made of planks the width of three fingers, polished by years of contact with the muzzles and hooves of beasts. Bruno said that we could clean them up and use them to build something else, and began to lever them out with the pickaxe. I noticed something on the floor and picked it up. It was a wooden cone, smooth and hollow, similar to the horn of an animal.

  “That’s used with a scythe stone,” Bruno said, when I showed it to him.

  “A scythe stone?”

  “A stone for sharpening the blade. There’s probably another word for it, but who knows what it is anymore. I should ask my mother. I think it’s a river stone.”

  “From the river?”

  I felt like a child to whom everything has to be explained. He showed infinite patience with these questions of mine. He took the horn from my hand and held it to his side, then explained: the scythe stone is a smooth, round stone, almost black. It has to be wet to work properly. You hang this from your belt with a little water inside, so that every so often while you are scything you can moisten the stone and sharpen the blade, like this.

  He made a sweeping, soft gesture with his arm, describing a half-moon above his head. I could see perfectly the imaginary scythe and the imaginary stone that was sharpening it. Only then did I realize that we were repeating one of our favorite games: I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before, since we had been in so many ruins just like this one. We would get in through holes in walls that were in danger of collapse. We walked on planks that moved beneath our feet. We would steal a few wrecked items and pretend that they were treasures. We had done it for years.

  So I began to see the project on which we were embarked in a slightly different light. Until then I had believed that I was only there for my father’s sake: to fulfill his wishes, to assuage my guilt. But at that moment, watching Bruno sharpening the imaginary scythe, the inheritance I’d received seemed more like a compensation or a second chance for our interrupted friendship. Was that what my father had wanted to give me? Bruno took one last look at the horn and tossed it onto the pile of wood set aside for burning. I went over to retrieve it and put it away, thinking that I would find some future use for it.

  I did the same with the Swiss pine that had managed to grow in the middle of the ruin. At five, when I was too tired to do anything else, I used the pickaxe to dig around the little tree and extricate it with its roots still intact. Its trunk was thin and twisted due to its efforts to reach the light from out amongst the rubble. With its roots exposed it looked moribund, and I hurried to replant it nearby. I dug a hole at the edge of the clearing, planting it where there was the best view of the lake, treading down firmly the earth that I used to cover its roots. But when I left it there, in the wind to which it was not accustomed, it was blown from side to side. Exposed to the elements from which it had been long protected, it looked like an altogether too fragile creation.

  “Do you think it will make it?” I asked.

  “Who knows,” said Bruno. “It’s a strange plant, that one. Strong where it decides to grow, and weak if you put it somewhere else.”

  “Have you tried before?”

  �
�A few times.”

  “How did it work out?”

  “Badly.”

  He looked at the ground, the way he did when thinking again about some old story. “My uncle wanted a Swiss pine in front of the house. I don’t know why, maybe he thought it would bring him good luck. And he sure needed it, no doubt about that. So every year he would send me to the mountain to get a sapling. But it always ended up getting trampled by the cows, and after a while we stopped trying.”

  “What do you call it here?”

  “The Swiss pine? Arula.”

  “That’s it. And it brings good luck?”

  “So they say. Perhaps it does if you believe it.”

  Whether lucky or not, I felt attached to that young tree. I sunk a stout stick next to its trunk and attached it at several points with twine. Then I went to the lake to fill a drinking bottle to water it with. When I got back I saw that Bruno had constructed a kind of low platform beneath the big wall. He had put on the ground two of the old roof beams and nailed on a few salvaged planks. Then he took from the rucksack a small rope and a rainproof sheet of the kind used in Grana to protect the hay in the fields. With two wooden stakes he attached two corners of the sheet to a crack in the rock and attached the other two to the ground, thus making a kind of shelter beneath which he put the rucksack and provisions.

  “Are we leaving this stuff there?” I asked.

  “We’re not leaving it, I’m staying there too.”

  “What do you mean you’re staying?”

  “I mean that I’m sleeping here.”

  “Sleeping there?”

  This time he lost patience, and replied brusquely: “I can’t just lose four working hours a day, can I? A builder stays on site Monday to Saturday. The laborer goes back and forth with the materials. That’s how it’s done.”

  I looked at the bivouac that he’d constructed. Now I understood why his rucksack had been so full.

  “And you want to sleep in there for four months?”

  “Three months, four months, whatever it takes. It’s summer. On Saturday I can go down and sleep in a bed.”